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Dropbox (News - Alert) today announced plans to continue expanding its global private
network across North America, Europe, and Australia with five new
regional accelerators that will increase performance and reliability for
its users globally.

As part of this expansion, Dropbox developed and deployed its own
custom-built "proxy stack" based on open-source infrastructure in its
North American facilities that has helped improve sync speeds and cut
networking costs in half.

"Since we began expanding our infrastructure footprint in early 2015, we
have cut networking costs outside of North America in half while
increasing our industry-leading
sync speeds globally by as much as 300 percent," said Dan Williams, Head
of Production Engineering, Dropbox. "This is possible because we have
built a global private network that enables us to bypass the complex web
of intermediaries that make up the Internet while sending traffic
directly to our own cloud infrastructure. We are excited to deploy these
enhancements for our users to other parts of the world."

The new regional accelerators will go online in Sydney, Miami then Paris
in Q3-2017, and Madrid and Milan in Q4-2017, extending performance
benefits beyond these cities to the regions where the accelerators are
based. By the end of 2017, Dropbox will have a total infrastructure
footprint spanning 25 facilities in ten
countries and four continent, including storage for users inside
and outside
of the U.S.

By establishing network infrastructure in regions where Dropbox is
seeing rapid adoption, and connecting them to its data centers over
private lines, Dropbox can maintain open connections to carry its
traffic using dedicated bandwidth. Each point of presence (PoP) is
co-located within third-party data centers that also house
infrastructure from other Internet service providers (ISPs); many of
which connect directly into Dropbox's network through thousands of
different peering relationships.

As a result, Dropbox users do not need to establish new connections
through multiple ISPs every time they access their data. Instead, user
data is routed through the nearest Dropbox PoP, lowering latency,
reducing the frequency of dropped signals, and ultimately accelerating
upload and download speeds. The new PoPs that Dropbox is introducing
this year will add to these performance benefits for every user,
regardless of location.

Cutting networking costs in half

The Dropbox
PoPs outside of the U.S. were developed and built with a custom
proxy stack architecture comprised of NGINX servers and open-sourced, IP
virtual servers (IPVS) that receive and balance traffic. Dropbox
engineers wrote code on top of these custom-built machines to manage
traffic flows. This service has helped improve performance and lower
costs by reducing dependency on third party hardware manufacturers, and
optimizing utilization with load balancers for each specific use case.

Starting today, Dropbox is deploying these proxy stacks across all of
its U.S. data centers, as well. As a result, it expects to cut its
overall costs for networking hardware and gain flexibility to scale with
future demand.

Dropbox keeps more than 500 million registered users on the same page
with easy-to-use collaboration tools and the fastest, most-reliable file
sync platform. From the smallest business to the largest enterprise, we
make teamwork better. For more information, please visit dropbox.com/news.